Orange County Museum of Art's expansion, on hold for 8 years, may finally be picking up steam

July 3, 2016

Updated July 5, 2016 4:08 p.m.

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Artist Marilyn Minter poses next to a black and white photograph entitled “Coral Ridge Towers,” a photo of her mom smoking. The photo is part of a bigger exhibition of Minter's work called Pretty/Dirty that opened April 2 at the Orange County Museum of Art. NICK KOON, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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The Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach has a collection of nearly 2,500 objects of modern and contemporary art, with a concentration on the art of California from the early 20th century to works by local, national, and international artists working today, according to its website. CINDY YAMANAKA, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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Marilyn Minter oversees the installation of her art exhibit entitled Pretty/Dirty at the Orange County Museum of Art in March. Minter explores ideas about female beauty, fashion, sex in her large-scale works of close-up faces caked with makeup and designer shoes dirtied with mud. She's been controversial in the past because of hard-core porn subjects. This retrospective looks at her early work from the 1970s to this decade. NICK KOON, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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The Orange County Museum of Art is located at 850 San Clemente Drive in Newport Beach. CINDY YAMANAKA, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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Artist Marilyn Minter has an exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art. They are an enamel on metal entitled 'Big Bang' (2012), enamel on metal entitled 'Not in These Shoes' (2013) and enamel on aluminum entitled 'Public Eye' (2013), from left. NICK KOON, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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Artist Marilyn Minter has an exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art since April 2. The artworks are type C print entitled 'Armpit' (2006) and and Enamel on metal entitled 'Dirty Heel' (2008). NICK KOON, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Artist Marilyn Minter poses next to a black and white photograph entitled “Coral Ridge Towers,” a photo of her mom smoking. The photo is part of a bigger exhibition of Minter's work called Pretty/Dirty that opened April 2 at the Orange County Museum of Art. NICK KOON, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

In May, the Orange County Museum of Art raised $535,000 at its Art of Dining fundraiser on a patch of lawn next to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

The black-tie event was held in a white tent. Works by Marilyn Minter, the subject of a solo show at the museum and the gala’s honoree, were projected inside. Tickets started at $1,250.

The annual party is a big moment for Orange County art patrons, but this year’s event was particularly significant. The money raised that night will help fund the museum’s operations, but the location of the party – a 1.6-acre stretch of grass edging the Segerstrom Center’s central plaza – is the spot where the future Orange County Museum of Art is set to be built.

The question is when.

Once, June 2016 was the deadline for the museum to finish the relocation from its home near Fashion Island in Newport Beach to a bigger one in Costa Mesa. Now, it’s slated to happen sometime in 2019, and even that soft target faces hurdles.

That’s not unusual. If there’s been a theme in the 54-year-old museum’s long-running plan to relocate and grow, it’s this – stagnation.

In the 1980s, the then-Newport Harbor Art Museum hooked up with a big-name architect (Renzo Piano, designer of the Pompidou center in Paris) and the Irvine Co. to expand to a 10-acre site in Newport Beach. But the plan fell apart.

In the 1990s, a second expansion plan, to merge Newport Harbor Art Museum and the Laguna Art Museum, ended without a merger but with the Newport museum taking on the name Orange County Museum of Art.

The current effort launched in 2008, when officials said they wanted to put the museum’s 3,000-piece permanent collection in a new 72,000-square-foot building at the centrally located Segerstrom Center. Since then, deadlines have been missed and fundraising efforts have sputtered out. Though museum officials have been working with architect Thom Mayne for eight years, plans for the new building have yet to be filed with the city of Costa Mesa.

Hanging over it all is the possibility that the land could revert to the Segerstrom Center if the new museum isn’t open three years from now. Museum officials are confident they won’t lose the property if they show progress on the project.

The key to making the relocation happen is money. As recently as 2014, the project was estimated at $50 million, but a museum official now won’t be specific about the price or say how big the new building might be. To date, neither museum construction nor the capital campaign to pay for that construction has begun.

The museum hired a new director, Todd DeShields Smith, two years ago. Smith had just overseen the relocation of the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida to its new home. Since then, he’s helped remake the Orange County museum’s day-to-day financial situation, but there hasn’t been tangible progress on the relocation.

When asked why the project is taking so long, Craig Wells, president of the museum’s Board of Trustees, cites a single reason: the recession of 2008. The recession hit just as fundraising was set to begin and, Wells said, the museum didn’t recover.

“I’m not going to guarantee that we may not ask for some extensions. On the other hand, it won’t be that we’re not going to do the project,” he said.

WE’RE DIFFERENT

Orange County has Disneyland. It has 42 miles of coast. It has widely respected classical music and theater and dance.

But visual art?

Cincinnati, Minneapolis and San Francisco are all smaller than Orange County, and all have art museums larger than the county’s in both size and scope.

Kevin Staniec, who programs art for the Orange County Great Park and directs the history- and literature-focused 1888 Center in Orange, suggests the county lacks a big, central art museum because it lacks a big, central downtown.

“You have so many different museums, all in different cities, hitting a different curation style,” Staniec said.

Downtown Santa Ana, the Laguna Art Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art and others all serve different communities. Though that makes the county’s art scene unique, it would benefit the county if there was a single “must-see” museum, he said.

“If the (new museum) building happens, and when it happens, I do think it will become a destination for Orange County as well as Southern California.”

Richard Stein, executive director of Arts Orange County, a nonprofit group that promotes arts, said the county’s city-specific way of thinking could be a challenge in raising money for the new museum.

“We do not revolve around one city the way most metropolitan areas do,” Stein said. With few exceptions, “we rarely work together … for a greater countywide vision.

“One of the challenges will be to see if they can break through that kind of (thinking) to attract a wider sense of countywide pride ... to make this next stage of growth successful,” he added.

Even when the Orange County museum was called Newport Harbor Art Museum, its leaders saw it as an institution that could grow into a regional attraction with a national reputation. Stein said that’s still what the move to the Segerstrom Center is about.

John Spiak, director and chief curator of Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, said the county museum has a history of offering innovative, sometimes challenging art – and that might help this relocation effort pan out.

“They have been on a national, international mark,” said Spiak, who is married to Cassandra Coblentz, the museum’s director of public engagement.

“They will have a world-class museum. ... I have no doubt the new building is going to be built this time.”

Wells said the county museum isn’t trying to be as big as other regional museums, like the Getty Center or the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The Orange County museum’s current iteration, in a 38,000-square-foot building in an office park near the shopping center, attracts around 23,000 visitors a year. That’s a fraction of the million people a year who visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Likewise, the Orange County museum’s budget is expected to be $2.8 million this year, much smaller than the roughly $91 million budget reported last year by LACMA.

Still, Wells said small should not be confused with inconsequential.

“We have for a long time sort of fought above our weight,” he said. “We have had exhibits that were on an international stature that were way beyond the size of our little old museum in Orange County.

“I think we can be a significant part of the arts scene in Southern California.”

A WIDER SCOPE

Under Smith, the Orange County museum has ramped up its programs.

Last year it hosted 10 exhibitions, as many as it had in the three previous years combined. The museum also has been known of late for “Bad Dog,” a giant outdoor sculpture – humorous to some, crass to others – of a dog lifting its leg to urinate on the building. The sculpture was part of a 2013 retrospective of work from contemporary artist Richard Jackson.

But with a new building and location, Smith says the museum would expand its scope. Now, it focuses on art from the past 50 years. But the new vision would add art from the early 20th century, contemporary art from the Pacific Rim and art related to design, filling niches other Orange County museums don’t.

The museum already is moving in that direction, with shows like the 2015 exhibit “My Generation,” featuring young Chinese artists, and an upcoming exhibit on early 20th century art from the Phillips Collection.

In a larger building, the museum could permanently display its own collection, even as it takes on other exhibits, Smith said.

As it stands, the museum has to shut down for weeks whenever it changes exhibits.

“Even though we’ve built an amazing collection over 50-plus years, we don’t have the gallery set up to show it at all times,” he said.

Smith said the museum’s staff, its board and the project’s architect are reviewing the building plans – set in 2008 – to ensure the project still meets the museum’s needs.

“We will be breaking ground in 2017, because that allows us to complete the project by 2019,” Smith said.

It’s a tight time frame, Wells acknowledged.

“I think it’s still realistic,” he said. “Ambitious, but not impossible.”

Some key elements of the project are not yet public.

Wells said the museum might release its building design in the last quarter of this year. At some point, the museum also will start a capital campaign, though Smith and Wells said it’s too early to set a launch date.

In recent years, the nonprofit museum has lost money – $1.04 million in the year ended March 31, 2014, and $824,000 for the previous year, according to tax forms.

But officials said the museum was in the black last year, with a surplus of $152,000. That 990 tax form hasn’t been filed, but the audit is underway, said museum spokeswoman Kirsten Schmidt.

Smith pointed to several cost-saving measures – including cutting the equivalent of seven full-time staffers, leaving a total of 15 full-time employees, and closing the museum store – as reasons for the turnaround.

As part of the financing for its relocation, the museum hopes to sell its current property, near Fashion Island, to Related California, a developer that has built high-rise housing in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In April, the firm went to the Newport Beach Planning Commission to present its plans to turn the museum land into a 25-story condominium tower.

The concept drew mixed reactions from the public; some welcomed the project as an avenue to a new art museum, but others complained the tower was too tall.

Money from that sale – an amount that hasn’t been disclosed – is critical to the museum’s relocation.

“A big part of the down payment for the future has to do with the sale of the museum property,” Wells said. “We’re working on that right now.”

And if the city rejects the builder’s plans, forcing the developer to back away from the deal and pulling that check away from the museum?

“We are certainly considering contingency plans,” Wells said. “(But) we’re planning on (the sale) happening, and right now the probability seems highly likely.”

Stein, of Arts Orange County, said a move could boost the museum’s profile. That, in turn, will help it attract more visitors and a broader base of support and allow it to take on bigger, provocative exhibitions.

Wells agreed.

“We have a small but very significant … museum here that we’re very, very proud of,” he said. “We’re on the eve of making it even better.”

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